


Field Repair

by JohnAmendAll



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-08
Updated: 2013-02-08
Packaged: 2017-11-28 15:32:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/676003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JohnAmendAll/pseuds/JohnAmendAll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was expecting a night out on the town, not an encounter with two Elements.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Field Repair

**Author's Note:**

> When I wrote a [gemstone-and-element random pairing generator](http://www.seasip.info/Misc/elements.html), one of the first prompts it came up with was "Iodine / Silver / infirmary". And eventually, I got round to writing fic for it.

"Hello? Can you hear me?" 

Karen blinked and shook her head, trying to work out what had happened. She'd been clubbing, she was fairly sure of that. Then she'd started to feel sick, and had gone out to get some fresh air. She remembered walking along beside the canal; there was a bridge where the road crossed it, with a flight of steps on the far side where you could get to the bus stop. But her memory ran out before she'd reached the steps. Her footsteps had been echoing from the walls of the underpass... then there was nothing but a blank. 

She looked around. She was lying on a leather sofa, in an elaborate open-plan house. Everything was modern, perfectly clean, and arranged with utter neatness. This wasn't somebody's home: it looked like a show house or a furniture shop. It was also entirely devoid of colour. Everything, from the walls to the carpet to the sky outside, was a shade of grey. 

The man who'd spoken to her would have stood out in almost any situation, let alone against the monochromatic background of the room. Slender, redheaded, he was dressed in a pale suit with a waistcoat that glittered in the light — wherever the light was coming from. 

"Who are you?" she managed. Speaking seemed to be an effort; she was becoming aware of an ache in her chest, as if something heavy was compressing it. 

"I'm Silver," the man said. "Don't try to move. What's your name?" 

"Karen." Karen tried to sit up, but her body didn't seem to be working. "What happened?" 

"You ran into something unpleasant, I'm afraid. I've got colleagues dealing with it now, but when we got there you'd already been hurt." 

"Hurt?" Karen made a renewed effort to sit up, but her body still wasn't having any. All she could manage was to turn her head and look down at herself. Her blouse was soaked with blood and had been neatly cut open, exposing a gaping wound in her chest. Not so much a wound, actually, now she looked. A better word would be _cavity_. Something shimmering and spiderlike, that might have been made of plastic, glass or metal, was straddling the hole, its gently pulsating legs plunging into the surrounding flesh. 

She made to grab at the thing, but found her hand held — gently, but quite firmly. 

"What is that?" she demanded. 

"It's a mechanical heart," Silver replied. "Rather a rush job, but then time was limited." 

"You mean my heart..." Karen looked down again at the spider, and wondered why she hadn't fainted. "Something ripped my heart out?" 

"I'm afraid you can't ask it why." Silver glanced at his watch. "By now it won't be in a state to answer any questions." 

"Silver." This was a new voice, a woman's. "What have you managed to do to yourself this time?" 

Karen managed to turn her head to see the newcomer: a snub-nosed, angular brunette, seemingly in her mid-thirties. Her long, mahogany-coloured hair was tied back in a ponytail, and her clothes — a pale jacket and dark trousers — were of a severe, practical cut. 

"Nothing," Silver replied, his tone slightly affronted. "You're here for this young lady." 

"A human?" The woman gave Karen a cold, appraising look. "I take it she's of some importance to history, then?" 

"Sapphire seems to think so. So we'd appreciate it if she didn't die, if you can manage that." 

"As a rule, when I kill my patients it's on purpose." The woman bent over Karen, holding her hand slightly above the wound. "Do you know what did this to her?" 

"Yes: A low-level intrusive entity. It's been neutralised." 

"But not before it got away with her heart." The woman gave him another glare. "I can see even you realised that, or you wouldn't have wasted your time with that ridiculous toy." She tapped the shimmering object that spanned Karen's wound. "I've seen humans make better artificial hearts than that." 

Silver looked even more affronted. "Personally, I thought it was rather elegant, given what I had to work with. And if you hadn't interrupted me I'd have improved it considerably by now." 

"I dread to think. Now, make yourself useful. I want boiling water and any spare organic material you can find." She looked around. "At least you picked somewhere reasonably sterile." 

"It was the closest place convenient," Silver said, and disappeared. 

The woman bent over Karen, her hair almost purple where the light caught it. 

"Amateurs," she said. "You're lucky they didn't finish you off altogether. I'm Iodine, by the way." 

"Karen," Karen managed. "Are you a doctor?" 

"Certainly not." 

"Am I... what's going to happen to me?" 

"I'm going to operate on you. After that, it's up to you. Where has that flippertigibbet got to?" 

"Right here," Silver said, appearing directly behind her. 

Iodine didn't exactly jump, but her fingers flexed slightly. 

"I've told you about doing that before," she said. "Don't." 

"It's not like you to get twitchy." 

"Never mind me. What have you got?" 

Silver held out a bubbling kettle. "Boiling water, and organic matter." 

"Hand it over." Iodine took the kettle, and sniffed at its contents. "Pretty poor stuff. If that toy —" she tapped the artificial heart "—wasn't on the point of running down I'd send you out for more." 

"I told you, I have to work with what I can find — just as you do. Her mobile telephone didn't have a lot of charge left." 

"That thing was a mobile telephone?" Iodine shrugged. "No wonder. I'd better get started straight away." 

Delicately, she inserted a finger into Karen's wound, then withdrew it, leaving a smear of red on her fingertip. 

"You may want to look away for this bit," she said. For a moment Karen wasn't sure if she meant her or Silver, but it was Silver who turned his back. Holding the kettle in one hand, Iodine dipped the finger with the bloodstain into the boiling water. For a few moments, she held that pose, violet light suffusing her irises, while the water foamed around her hand. 

As the froth subsided, Iodine withdrew her finger from the kettle, revealing that the boiling water had not harmed her in the slightest. "That's the worst bit out of the way," she said. 

Silver turned back, and gave the liquid in the kettle a dubious look. "You think that'll do the trick?" 

"Of course it will. When I say, I want you to get that gadget of yours out of her body, and not so much as a molecule left behind." She turned back to Karen. "Karen, you may find this stings a bit." 

Iodine reached into the wound. There was a sizzling noise, almost on the edge of hearing, and pain shot through Karen's chest. She gritted her teeth, fighting the urge to faint. She'd lasted this far: she'd see this thing through to the end. 

Then, Iodine shot a glance at Silver. No words were exchanged, but Silver was leaning in beside her. His hand closed around the artificial heart; with quiet sucking noises, and fresh stabs of pain, the device detached itself from her body and folded itself up into his palm. 

"This bit always seems so inelegant," Silver protested mildly, his eyes on whatever Iodine was doing to Karen's chest. "Don't you ever get the urge to make a few improvements?" 

"If I do, I keep it to myself." The pain was easing slightly now, as Iodine moved her hand this way and that. Karen suddenly realised she had a pulse; she hadn't noticed its absence until now. 

"Very disciplined of you." 

The pain faded to a dull throb. Iodine set the now-empty kettle down, and turned to Silver. 

"I'll be going now," she said. "Unless you can think of some other reason to keep me around?" 

"The pleasure of your company?" Silver suggested. 

"Don't be silly." 

Weariness seemed to be stealing over Karen. It was becoming harder and harder to keep her eyes open. 

"You might just as well ask me to make a mistake." Silver tossed Iodine the gadget he'd removed from Karen. "Here. A souvenir." 

Iodine looked down at it. "And what am I supposed to do with that?" 

Sleep had almost overcome Karen. Silver's final reply seemed to come from a great distance. 

"Whatever you like. But mainly it's so I can say: My heart is in your hand." 

Before Karen could make out Iodine's final answer, sleep overtook her. 

*

"Hey!" 

Karen felt stiff and uncomfortable, and someone was standing over her. 

"What do you want now?" she demanded. 

"This is the depot, lady. You must've missed your stop." 

Karen rubbed her eyes. She was in an empty bus, slumped across a double seat. The ache in her chest had gone; looking down at her blouse, she found it free of blood and completely intact. 

"Maybe I dreamed it all," she said, to herself rather than the bus driver who'd woken her. "Dunno." 

"You can't stay there, lady." 

"OK. OK." Karen dragged herself upright and followed the man out of the bus. There was an advertisement for perfume on the partition by the cab; she did a double-take as she recognised the impossibly perfect, monochrome room. At least in the picture it was empty. If Iodine or Silver had been there, she wasn't sure what she'd have done. 

_Dream,_ she decided, on the long walk back to her flat from the bus depot. _No way anything like that could have happened for real._

She never did find her mobile telephone, though.


End file.
